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Title : On Baseball and Joy
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On Baseball and Joy
October baseball is the best baseball.Whether you like baseball or not, it’s impossible not to love the pure, unadulterated joy on the face of a major league slugger when he slams a clutch three-run homer into Fenway’s Green Monster during game one of the World Series.
That’s what Red Sox infielder Eduardo Nunez did in the bottom of the seventh inning on Monday. And as much as I hate the Red Sox, it was beautiful to watch. That kind of joy is primal in its authentic spontaneity. You can watch a child’s lifelong dream distilled down into a single moment on the face of a grown man, and unless you have ice in your veins, it will make your heart explode.
My relationship with baseball is kind of involuntary, by which I mean I’m a Yankees fan by birth and osmosis more than by free will. I’m a third-generation Bronx-born, only-daughter of a hardcore Yankees baseball fan. My dad has written books and articles about the sport, pores over baseball statistics, and brought me to several games a year at “The Old Yankee Stadium,” where the seats were sticky with gum and the only available concessions were peanuts, hot dogs, beer, and maybe cotton candy.
In our apartment, baseball was always on in the background: Don Mattingly and Willie Randolph in their prime, drifting off to sleep next to my dad, watching every game on an ancient Zenith TV with an analog dial and the volume turned off. (My dad liked the radio announcers better; he had no patience for the TV guys).
I didn’t go out of my way to watch the Great American Pastime™ or learn about it. In fact, I was pretty indifferent to baseball and found it a little boring, even. It was just something that was around me all the time, and continues to be. (Both my husband and son are baseball-obsessed).
Given that, I really should know a lot more about the game than I do. I’m not a stats nerd and I don’t know the finer points of calculating an ERA. I can’t keep up with trades and free agency, or who’s on or off the DL at any given moment, and it frequently takes me a minute or two to figure out what just happened on a double play.
After 9/11, Yankees baseball unified a grieving city of 8 million souls. Baseball tracks emotions and seasons in a way that feels bigger than the sport itself. Yet for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, which in the case of the Nunez homer, was L.A. Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood’s grief at having choked; he let a pinch-hitter go yard off his knuckle curve ball during one of the most important games of his career.
Still.
After 9/11, Yankees baseball unified a grieving city of 8 million souls. Baseball tracks emotions and seasons in a way that feels bigger than the sport itself. Yet for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, which in the case of the Nunez homer, was L.A. Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood’s grief at having choked; he let a pinch-hitter go yard off his knuckle curve ball during one of the most important games of his career.
Still.
I keep coming back to that unmitigated joy. Now more than ever, we need it in our lives.
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